The Solar system is bigger than NASA thought. There are a lot of huge objects at the edge of the solar system that we have not seen but can indirectly estimate.
When astronomers say Kuiper Belt Object think larger asteroid belt beyond Neptune. This larger belt includes Pluto and its moon and they are far bigger than anything in the Asteroid belt. The Asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is smaller. The estimation of the mass in the Kuiper belt was about 2% of the Earth or about 1.5 times the moon. The Asteroid belt is about 3% of the mass of the moon which is about 81 times less than the Earth. The Kuiper Belt should have 40-60 times more material than than Asteroid belt.
The average distance between 1-10 kilometer sized objects in the Kuiper Belt is about the distance from the Earth to the moon.
The Oort comet cloud is thought to occupy a vast space somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 AU (0.03 and 0.08 ly) from the Sun to as far out as 50,000 AU (0.79 ly) or even 100,000 to 200,000 AU (1.58 to 3.16 ly). Oort is estimated to be ten to 100 times the mass of the Earth. Each on kilometer or bigger object in the Oort would on average be as far apart as the Earth from Mars.
Data from the New Horizons space probe and the Japanese Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, have discovered a number KBOs (kuiper belt objects) far beyond the expected outer edge of the Kuiper Belt. This outer edge (where the density of objects starts to decline) was thought to be at about 50 AU, but new evidence suggests the belt may extend to 80 AU, or farther. One AU is the distance from the Earth to the sun and is 93 million miles.
The Kuiper Belt is a doughnut-shaped region of icy bodies that extends beyond Neptune’s orbit. It’s a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 astronomical units to approximately 80 AU from the Sun.
The Kuiper belt is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger. It now believed to be 50 times as wide and 60-600 times as massive. The estimate was that there were 100,000 Death Star sized objects or larger in the Kuiper Belt. The original Star Wars Death Star was about 120 kilometers wide. The estimate was about 100,000 objects that were about 100 kilometers in diameter or larger. The volume of the Kuiper belt is now known to be far larger.
The thickness of the Kuiper Belt is approximately 10 AU.
This means the Kuiper belt is a 5 billion mile wide donut and not a 2 billion wide donut.
Scientists are looking at other possible reasons for the high SDC dust readings. One possibility, perhaps less likely, is radiation pressure and other factors pushing dust created in the inner Kuiper Belt out past 50 AU. New Horizons could also have encountered shorter-lived ice particles that cannot reach the inner parts of the solar system and were not yet accounted for in the current models of the Kuiper Belt.
“These new scientific results from New Horizons may be the first time that any spacecraft has discovered a new population of bodies in our solar system,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder. “I can’t wait to see how much farther out these elevated Kuiper Belt dust levels go.”
The effect of Kuiper belt gravity on objects may not change the mass approximation that much but the far larger thickness will change calculations and approximations to something higher. It could possibly increase the estimate to 300,000 Death Star sized objects instead of 100,000. I think the new estimate will likely end up being 130,000 to 200,000 such large objects.
The old Kuiper belt volume would have been about 20,000 cubic AU less 7000 cubic AU for about 13000 cubic AU.
Now the Kuiper belt volume is about 50,000 cubic AI less 7000 cubic AU for about 43000 Cubic AU.
This is an example of how little we know about the size and structure of things in the solar system. Just like we keep confirming the discovery of dozens more moons for Saturn and Jupiter every few years.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I don’t know about those calculations. They seem OFF to me.
Numerical (discrete) integration of a normal distribution (my naïve first choice) of Kuiper Belt Objects from 30 AU to 80 AU, peaking at 10 AU width around 65 AU leads to a Kuiper Belt volume of about 43,000 AU³ (rather remarkably, entirely consistent with the article’s number! )
But what’s in a cubic astronomical unit of volume?
1 AU approximately is 149,500,000 km, or in scientific notation, 149.5×10⁶ km . (1.495×10⁸ for the purists). A cubic one is that to the third power: 3.34×10²⁴ km³ per AU³. Now we just multiply that by 43,000 AU³ to get 1.44×10²⁹ km³ in the Kuiper Belt, in terms of Terran cubic kilometers.
And then we divide by the volume of the sphere that corresponds to the Terra-Luna orbit, to get an idea of how many imagined Earth-Moon orbital spheres might fit in there.
Radius is 400,000 km more or less.
Orbital volume is (⁴⁄₃πR³) so → 2.68×10¹⁷ km³ … do the division into KB volume
Luna orbital volumes in KB ring = 5.4×10¹¹ or about 540,000,000,000 of them.
AH… this is where my intuition of the numbers given being off was right. They claim something like 50,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 (i.e. small compared to 540 billion). So I’d venture if the NUMBER that they estimate is valid (50,000 to 200,000), then the mean distance between them must be much larger.
Working it backwards, and going with 100,000 objects, then 1.44×10²⁹ km³ in KBelt ÷ 10⁵ objects = 1.44×10²⁴ km³ per Death Star … in big virtual spheres, packing together well. And that would be about 118,000,000 km apart, on the average .
About 250× further distant from each other than one Earth-Moon radius.
This makes me much happier: I wouldn’t get the impression they’d be crashing into each other all the time, at that much greater inter-object mean distance.
At the (glib) Earth-Moon distance projection, it’d be a freaking orbital pinball game.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
See you in Oort cloud!
“That’s no moon!”
Maybe this accounts for a significant amount of the elusive Dark Matter scientists say must be there to keep the galaxies from flying apart?
“The average distance between 1-10 kilometer sized objects in the Kuiper Belt is about the distance from the Earth to the moon.”
Is that all? Very surprising!
All this mean is more opportunity for those who master the art of building O’neill style space colonies.
These are bodies that would be ideal for space colonization… If we manage nuclear fusion, because they’re sure as heck not relying on solar power.
Just the place for a group that doesn’t want nosy neighbors to settle down. Light off a fusion rocket, live off the waste heat, and presto: Instant generation ship.
It will come. It’s not and endless quest. Fusion is a tougher nut to crack than we thought it was a few decades ago, but technology is improving and gradually moving there, until one day it’ll work.
Even if there are no other major developments in energy and propulsion on the foreseeable history (a big IF), it will come a day when what you say comes to pass as well.
By the hands of robotic industrial self-replication in space and/or humans, but those places will be considered as worthy of habitation one day. We simply aren’t used to think up to what depths of time and scales of development humanity’s history will eventually go. We simply have short dreams, thinking humans will be forever on this part of the Solar System, huddled together in the warm of the Sun.
Well, the Sun will be a beacon of hope and familiarity for humans, but knowing a bit about us, a few eccentrics will take another route, into the deepness of space, just to avoid the control of the nosy inners.
” Fusion is a tougher nut to crack than we thought it was a few decades ago, ”
Fusion is a nut that was cracked back in the ’50’s. Small scale and/or steady state fusion is the hard nut to crack. Nature is telling us with fusion, “Go big or stay home.”
But, I agree, we will crack it eventually, we’re getting really close. Still won’t be economical compared to fission, where fissionable elements are available. (That stuff WANTS to fission!) But very useful where they aren’t.
The REALLY tough fusion nut is protium fusion. But once we’ve managed that, the fuel supply increases about 6,000 times.
Fascinating. The solar system is just beginning to be explored. Instead of a new deep space mission every decade or so, we should start mass producing probes and launching say one every month or so to a different part of the outer solar system. Some would fail but after a 10 year lag we would start to have new arrivals every month.
I’ve never understood why that approach wasn’t taken decades ago.
Maybe it was, but not for public eyes 🙂
Currently existing deep space probes rely on a rare alignment of planets to do multiple gravity assists and fling one way out there in the desired direction and getting a nice flyby on each planet they use for gravity assists as a freebie.